So here is my Commencement Speech... or at least what I wrote for it? I'm sure it's different from what I actually said, but that's okay.
Every time I have bumped into Dr. Nichols this semester, he’s always had the same thing to say. “Short, Michael” He calls me Michael… He and my mother are the only two. “Remember to keep it short.” So I had to tell him that I’m going to get him back for every Core Lecture I had to sit through. I was going to pass out notes, bring a projector so I could draw diagrams, the whole nine yards. So, faculty, consider this payback…
And speaking of the faculty, I would like to thank the faculty for moving our Commencement Ceremony back to Sunday, because you’ve saved me a good deal of money on a Mother’s Day present… Also, Happy Mother’s Day, Mom… I love you…
Albert Einstein once said, “Never think of the future—it comes soon enough.” However, today it almost seems impossible to not think of the future… Our time here at Saint Joseph’s College has all been a quest for the future… We have passed all of the right classes, and now it is time to take that next step into the future, no matter whatever direction that next step needs to be… Now that the future is going to come hurling at us faster than the speed of light, we must hope and pray this education gives us the strength, courage, and capacity to meet in head-on…
It is meeting these challenges head-on that we are going to have no choice but to do every day of the rest of our lives… But we should be ready… We’ve read all the Core books—okay maybe that’s not the best example… We’ve attended all the lectures—dang, I guess that won’t work either… Well, like I said, we’ve passed all of our classes, and now we are ready… All we need to do is embrace these challenges the future will inevitably bring us, and overcome them with pride… When I student taught last semester, I always told my students to not think of the test or quiz I was handing them as a challenging exam, but simply as an opportunity to achieve—yes, I was that guy… It’s like Mary Poppins once sang, “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”
One lesson I have learned one thing during my four years here that I want everyone to know about, it’s just that. Take reality, and the future that follows, with a dose of optimism… No matter how large a dose you need—whether it is the 20-milligram dose you need to finish your Core 10 presentation, or enough optimism to fill the reflecting pond when you listen to Avenue Q and they sing “what do you do with a B.A. in English” (But that may just be me)—the optimism will aid in every situation, changing it for the better…
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said… “what lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us”… So while we reflect of everything awesome we have been a part of in four years—whether it be October 8th, 2008 or celebrating the Basketball team’s awesome run to the Elite Eight—those things lie behind us… And we have enough optimism to take care of whatever future lies before us… But what lies within us, after our four years at Saint Joseph’s College? Is it the vignettes from House on Mango Street? Maybe… But more likely, it is Religio, Moralitas, and Scientia… More likely, it is the wisdom, strength, courage, and tenacity to do anything we want to do, and be anything we want to be…
On behalf of the Class of 2010, I would like to thank all of the faculty and friends, family and mentors—especially moms—for coming and celebrating our achievements. I speak for all of us when I say that we wouldn’t be sitting here without your love and support… And to my classmates, congratulations! I hope nothing but the best for all of you with your future endeavours… I can’t wait to be the creepy drunk alumni with you… I would like to leave everyone with words rehearsed by the cast of the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee so often… “Goodbye. Goodbye, goodbye” Esto Dignus Saint Joseph’s College.
02 June, 2010
11 May, 2010
My Final Reflection
Here is my final editorial from the Observer...
I believe that, as this is the final time I will be writing something for the Observer, I should probably use as many hackneyed and cliché idioms and colloquialisms as I can possibly muster in order to make this one of those quintessential senior goodbye type of reflections. Anything I can do to cue the waterworks, I guess…
Except this will not be one of those reflections.
As I sit and pensively ponder what sincere reflection I can offer the student body, I find myself with the common college distraction—facebook. Instead of discovering some serene inspiration from the social-networking productivity black hole, I find myself growing tired and angry at the amass of mindless fodder that fills my newsfeed, both top news and most recent.
Call me old fashioned, but I firmly believe there is an etiquette to existing—and living, if you will—in the digital world on a social networking site, facebook or the like. And, at the risk of sounding like my grandfather, there should be some conventional requirements as to social behaviour. Follow my logic: facebook is a social networking site, so your etiquette should be socially appropriate.
People’s actions on facebook have been a point of contention for me for some time. At the risk of sounding like a pretentious indie-kid, I’ve had a facebook account since my junior year of high school—and yes, that was back when facebook was limited to a network for college students. At that point, high school students could have a profile if a college student, with an already existing profile, invited them to the network.
As I have watched facebook grow and develop, the sleek and clean interactions between friends has become cluttered and convoluted by fan pages, applications and scourge that is Farmville. While I genuinely think the games on facebook have crawled from the depths of Satan’s asshole, they do successfully provide a way to idly consume one’s time. If people are really that desperate for something to do online and are unwilling to unplug, whatever.
I’m more okay with such useless behaviour because I can hide it from my feed; I do not have to concern myself with such banal trifles. However, in that vein, I do not want to participate in Farmville, Mafia Wars, Wizarding Academy, Dante’s Inferno, Friend of the Day, Petsville, My Aquarium, Honesty Box, nor do I want to know what my husband looks like, so please, for the sake of my sanity and all things holy, do not send me invitations for such things.
Not only do I not want invites to asinine applications, I equally do not want invites to fan pages about winning free iPads or other such nonsensical crap. Those type of gimmicks remind me of the terrible chain emails received once upon a time—SEND THIS TO TEN PEOPLE TO GET AN APPLEBEES GIFT CERTIFICATE. My problem is that I received emails like that when I created my first email account, back when the internet was only ran at a dial-up speed. You know, when I was in grade school and my email address was TMNT4ever@aol.com.
And what’s worse is they’ve just recently changed the “page” format. No longer are you a “fan” of pages, you simply “like” them, which confuses the process entirely. At first, I was chagrined to see friends being a fan of “In Kindergarten, girls had Cooties. Now, they have STDs”, not only because the sentence popping up on my news feed was structurally unsound, but because these pages are some of the most ignorant fodder I’ve seen since I stopped watching MTV.
Pages, according to facebook’s terms of use, are “special profiles that may only be used to promote a business or other commercial, political, or charitable organization or endeavor.” I’m pretty sure there’s not a charitable, nor political, organization concerned with renaming cooties STDs. I’m pretty sure there’s not a business trying to promote “The Gaga Law,” no matter how many gaga, ro-mamas you think equal a bad romance. I have a couple friends that have almost 1250 pages they “like”.
Call me a purest for wanting a clean and tidy social networking site; call me a party-pooper because I’m unwilling to have fun with “pages” because it is against the terms of use; call me whatever you’d like. However, if you’re someone who likes the page “WAIT!..OMG!...WHERE IS MY PHONE I THINK I LOST IT!!....oh wait here it is”, I’m going to call you a waste of digital space.
While I have, in fact, had those moments when I thought I lost my phone for a split second, I do not need to commiserate with others on facebook about it. It has become a space on facebook where people can troll and compete to comment first. It just needs to stop. Then, what’s worse is the new trend of pages that you must like in order to see the content. Really, people?! Again, reflecting upon my first email account—SEND THIS TO TEN PEOPLE AND THE PHOTO WILL POP UP ON YOUR EMAIL. I got that one, too.
If your curiosity is so insatiable that you must know “The Prom Dress That Got This Girl Suspended From School”, and you find your cursor hovering dangerously close to the “Like” icon, stop. Just stop and step away from your computer. Carefully take your finger, lick it thrice, then place it in your ear and swirl it around. Then, every time you consider “liking” something of that nature, think about how embarrassing it was to give yourself a wet-willy.
Seriously, I found myself curious about this dress just the other day. However, rather than subjecting myself to such juvenile undertaking, I simply remembered that on the internet, there are these magical things that let you search for whatever you want—they’re called search engines. So I hopped on over to my engine of choice, Blackle.com, and I typed in “the prom dress that got this girl suspended from school” and TA DA! I found an article from CNN about a girl who was suspended because of the prom dress she wore. What a brave new world, indeed.
So please, next time you find yourself drowning hours of your life into facebook, remember that you are no longer seven, and acting like a seven year old is not okay. Practice good etiquette when participating in social networking, I beg of you.
That is my parting wish for the student body, as I approach graduation. I don’t want to seem like a jerk because I’m de-friending people after I graduate, but I just cannot handle some people’s lack of tact on facebook. I have left the paper in the hands of capable people, who don’t participate in such tomfoolery online.
Esto Dignus.
I believe that, as this is the final time I will be writing something for the Observer, I should probably use as many hackneyed and cliché idioms and colloquialisms as I can possibly muster in order to make this one of those quintessential senior goodbye type of reflections. Anything I can do to cue the waterworks, I guess…
Except this will not be one of those reflections.
As I sit and pensively ponder what sincere reflection I can offer the student body, I find myself with the common college distraction—facebook. Instead of discovering some serene inspiration from the social-networking productivity black hole, I find myself growing tired and angry at the amass of mindless fodder that fills my newsfeed, both top news and most recent.
Call me old fashioned, but I firmly believe there is an etiquette to existing—and living, if you will—in the digital world on a social networking site, facebook or the like. And, at the risk of sounding like my grandfather, there should be some conventional requirements as to social behaviour. Follow my logic: facebook is a social networking site, so your etiquette should be socially appropriate.
People’s actions on facebook have been a point of contention for me for some time. At the risk of sounding like a pretentious indie-kid, I’ve had a facebook account since my junior year of high school—and yes, that was back when facebook was limited to a network for college students. At that point, high school students could have a profile if a college student, with an already existing profile, invited them to the network.
As I have watched facebook grow and develop, the sleek and clean interactions between friends has become cluttered and convoluted by fan pages, applications and scourge that is Farmville. While I genuinely think the games on facebook have crawled from the depths of Satan’s asshole, they do successfully provide a way to idly consume one’s time. If people are really that desperate for something to do online and are unwilling to unplug, whatever.
I’m more okay with such useless behaviour because I can hide it from my feed; I do not have to concern myself with such banal trifles. However, in that vein, I do not want to participate in Farmville, Mafia Wars, Wizarding Academy, Dante’s Inferno, Friend of the Day, Petsville, My Aquarium, Honesty Box, nor do I want to know what my husband looks like, so please, for the sake of my sanity and all things holy, do not send me invitations for such things.
Not only do I not want invites to asinine applications, I equally do not want invites to fan pages about winning free iPads or other such nonsensical crap. Those type of gimmicks remind me of the terrible chain emails received once upon a time—SEND THIS TO TEN PEOPLE TO GET AN APPLEBEES GIFT CERTIFICATE. My problem is that I received emails like that when I created my first email account, back when the internet was only ran at a dial-up speed. You know, when I was in grade school and my email address was TMNT4ever@aol.com.
And what’s worse is they’ve just recently changed the “page” format. No longer are you a “fan” of pages, you simply “like” them, which confuses the process entirely. At first, I was chagrined to see friends being a fan of “In Kindergarten, girls had Cooties. Now, they have STDs”, not only because the sentence popping up on my news feed was structurally unsound, but because these pages are some of the most ignorant fodder I’ve seen since I stopped watching MTV.
Pages, according to facebook’s terms of use, are “special profiles that may only be used to promote a business or other commercial, political, or charitable organization or endeavor.” I’m pretty sure there’s not a charitable, nor political, organization concerned with renaming cooties STDs. I’m pretty sure there’s not a business trying to promote “The Gaga Law,” no matter how many gaga, ro-mamas you think equal a bad romance. I have a couple friends that have almost 1250 pages they “like”.
Call me a purest for wanting a clean and tidy social networking site; call me a party-pooper because I’m unwilling to have fun with “pages” because it is against the terms of use; call me whatever you’d like. However, if you’re someone who likes the page “WAIT!..OMG!...WHERE IS MY PHONE I THINK I LOST IT!!....oh wait here it is”, I’m going to call you a waste of digital space.
While I have, in fact, had those moments when I thought I lost my phone for a split second, I do not need to commiserate with others on facebook about it. It has become a space on facebook where people can troll and compete to comment first. It just needs to stop. Then, what’s worse is the new trend of pages that you must like in order to see the content. Really, people?! Again, reflecting upon my first email account—SEND THIS TO TEN PEOPLE AND THE PHOTO WILL POP UP ON YOUR EMAIL. I got that one, too.
If your curiosity is so insatiable that you must know “The Prom Dress That Got This Girl Suspended From School”, and you find your cursor hovering dangerously close to the “Like” icon, stop. Just stop and step away from your computer. Carefully take your finger, lick it thrice, then place it in your ear and swirl it around. Then, every time you consider “liking” something of that nature, think about how embarrassing it was to give yourself a wet-willy.
Seriously, I found myself curious about this dress just the other day. However, rather than subjecting myself to such juvenile undertaking, I simply remembered that on the internet, there are these magical things that let you search for whatever you want—they’re called search engines. So I hopped on over to my engine of choice, Blackle.com, and I typed in “the prom dress that got this girl suspended from school” and TA DA! I found an article from CNN about a girl who was suspended because of the prom dress she wore. What a brave new world, indeed.
So please, next time you find yourself drowning hours of your life into facebook, remember that you are no longer seven, and acting like a seven year old is not okay. Practice good etiquette when participating in social networking, I beg of you.
That is my parting wish for the student body, as I approach graduation. I don’t want to seem like a jerk because I’m de-friending people after I graduate, but I just cannot handle some people’s lack of tact on facebook. I have left the paper in the hands of capable people, who don’t participate in such tomfoolery online.
Esto Dignus.
26 February, 2010
Danger! Evolution in Progress!
Thanks to the Chinese Water Torture that is Core 6, I understand that evolution is a biological process of changing in species over time due to mutation or natural selection. Because evolution takes place over long expanses of time, I wonder if it is ever something I could witness happening. I can see evolution other places—that is, just changes in other things.
For example, I’ve seen quite an evolution of fashion.
Every kid I taught last semester thought it was cool to wear flannel/plaid shirts. Had I student taught three years ago, every kid would have been sporting their cool new pair of Crocs. This concept should make sense to even the most dense of individuals. None of us dress the way our parents did at our age.
I often wonder if the evolution of one thing could have an impact on another. Could the current fads that have evolved in the fashion world change the course of our biological evolution, as a species? If so, the female gender could be diverging—diverging in a frightening way.
Within a couple generations, I predict a portion of the female population shall most likely evolve into a different breed of Homo sapien, a breed of Homo sapien impervious to cold in their bottom half.
Given the frigid temperature outside, I find myself bundling up and wearing an abundance of clothing to compensate for my body’s inability to keep warm. However, it seems having two X-chromosomes has given certain individuals skin so thick, pants are no longer required outdoors. The single-digit temperatures have no effect.
Tights, most appropriate for a staging of Peter Pan, have replaced pants as the necessary attire for the female nether-region, even in the great outdoors. Can you say brrr? I don’t even like changing my underwear in my room when the heat isn’t working; I can’t imagine facing the arctic winds with only a thin layer of fabric for protection.
This evolution—a south-of-the-border, thick-skinned situation—leads me to believe that women will begin developing excess blubbery deposits, disproportioning and widening the bottom of the female figure. This is the only logical explanation for the other fashion evolutionary trend, the UGG boot.
History has shown that women often make inappropriate decisions regarding footwear. Look at the Chinese, who bound and wrapped their feet for centuries. Now, instead of binding and wrapping them in bandages, ladies choose to just wrap them in sheepskin and dead squirrels. However, these boots, given their ostentatious size, provide more ample support for the amply expanding appendages formerly known as shapely.
Thinking like the evolutionary scientist Core 6 has lectured me to be, this amassing increase allows women to become the ultimate Weeble-Wobble. However, developments of this voluminous nature will render those of a feminine persuasion hideous and utterly unattractive. Fugly.
The aforementioned gender, in its newly appalling evolutionary state, would result in the immediate decline of global birth rates. This declination would bottom out at nil. It doesn’t take a science major to realize what that means…
Girls wearing tights instead of pants in the middle of winter will cause the extinction of humankind.
For example, I’ve seen quite an evolution of fashion.
Every kid I taught last semester thought it was cool to wear flannel/plaid shirts. Had I student taught three years ago, every kid would have been sporting their cool new pair of Crocs. This concept should make sense to even the most dense of individuals. None of us dress the way our parents did at our age.
I often wonder if the evolution of one thing could have an impact on another. Could the current fads that have evolved in the fashion world change the course of our biological evolution, as a species? If so, the female gender could be diverging—diverging in a frightening way.
Within a couple generations, I predict a portion of the female population shall most likely evolve into a different breed of Homo sapien, a breed of Homo sapien impervious to cold in their bottom half.
Given the frigid temperature outside, I find myself bundling up and wearing an abundance of clothing to compensate for my body’s inability to keep warm. However, it seems having two X-chromosomes has given certain individuals skin so thick, pants are no longer required outdoors. The single-digit temperatures have no effect.
Tights, most appropriate for a staging of Peter Pan, have replaced pants as the necessary attire for the female nether-region, even in the great outdoors. Can you say brrr? I don’t even like changing my underwear in my room when the heat isn’t working; I can’t imagine facing the arctic winds with only a thin layer of fabric for protection.
This evolution—a south-of-the-border, thick-skinned situation—leads me to believe that women will begin developing excess blubbery deposits, disproportioning and widening the bottom of the female figure. This is the only logical explanation for the other fashion evolutionary trend, the UGG boot.
History has shown that women often make inappropriate decisions regarding footwear. Look at the Chinese, who bound and wrapped their feet for centuries. Now, instead of binding and wrapping them in bandages, ladies choose to just wrap them in sheepskin and dead squirrels. However, these boots, given their ostentatious size, provide more ample support for the amply expanding appendages formerly known as shapely.
Thinking like the evolutionary scientist Core 6 has lectured me to be, this amassing increase allows women to become the ultimate Weeble-Wobble. However, developments of this voluminous nature will render those of a feminine persuasion hideous and utterly unattractive. Fugly.
The aforementioned gender, in its newly appalling evolutionary state, would result in the immediate decline of global birth rates. This declination would bottom out at nil. It doesn’t take a science major to realize what that means…
Girls wearing tights instead of pants in the middle of winter will cause the extinction of humankind.
01 February, 2010
A Question
okay...
I need to know this.
Am I the only person on this planet not gaga for Lady Gaga?
I think she's just dreadful, but I feel like I'm the only one. Even my pretentious, music-elitist friends think she's the cat's meow.
I need to know this.
Am I the only person on this planet not gaga for Lady Gaga?
I think she's just dreadful, but I feel like I'm the only one. Even my pretentious, music-elitist friends think she's the cat's meow.
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